Instagram Jail
I got an email early yesterday morning, saying that Instagram had suspended the KXEL account for violating rules and community standards.
My first thought was it was because we “liked” a photo Todd Starnes had posted of a 12-ounce breaded pork tenderloin he had while in Cedar Falls recently. It was obscene…but obscenely delicious.
I ignored the email, because there are a lot of spammers who try to get access to your Facebook account that way. But when I went to our Instagram page on line…sure enough, we had been suspended, and our Threads page which is connected to Instagram was also suspended.
We very rarely “like” anything we see on the station account, and our posting is generally limited to a photo of a screen shot of the video of these commentaries, along with a link to the Rumble page where you can watch the video.
When we were spanked, two different times, by YouTube for these commentaries, we were told which ones were offensive—each was at least a year and a half old, so obviously a threat to society. But this was out of the blue, with no specificity and no warning.
We did click the “appeal this decision” button and the automated response said they’d look at it again.
By the way, KXEL is—at least for now—still on Twitter/X, Facebook, Gab, Gettr, MeWe, Truth Social and LinkedIn. And we post videos of these commentaries on the KXEL YouTube, Rumble, and Facebook pages.
Curious that I post links to these same videos on my personal Instagram and Threads accounts…with no red flag, warning or suspension.
So a radio station with a massive 50,000-watt reach that carries national programming that is decidedly conservative politically and uses the Rumble platform for video links finds its Instagram account suspended suddenly less than four months before a major election. That can’t be. Or can it?
